Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Openings & Closings

I do not sew. So I can't explain why, when it came to working in this book (themed Openings & Closings), my mind immediately thought of zippers. I did like the idea of zippers being able to open and close. Then I decided that I wanted to be able to attach, detach and even re-attach the pages with zippers. Okay, but what to do with the rest of the book pages?

Enter the idea of found poetry. (Found poetry also happens to be a topic in this month's lessons in Lisa Vollrath's A Year of Altered Books class. Coincidence? I think not). I decided to go through the words of the book pages and circle the words that related to "open" and "close." Since this was a book on gardening, there were not many literal references. I was forced to expand my definition of open and close in order to find enough words to make this piece work. For open, I chose words like grow, bloom, window, illuminating, etc. For close, there was dormancy, blind, cornered, nonblossoming. You get the picture.

If you google found poetry or look on Pinterest, you will see a lot of doodling in and around the found poetry words. This inspired me to take out my barely-used Micron pens and to try my hand at doodling for the very first time. Don't laugh. A friend recently gave me a Zenspirations book which gives step-by-step instructions on how to doodle which I found extremely helpful.

As you can see, the found poetry words got lost in the busy-ness of the doodles and other text on the page. I felt that highlighting them would make them stand out more. I used green highlighter for the "open" words and pink highlighter for the "close" words.

My spread begins with a two-page spread in the book itself. I then took two loose pages and attached them to the pages in the book with separating zippers creating a four-page spread. I then folded the two outer pages in toward the gutter of the book and attached a third zipper. This is how the spread looks zipped closed:

This is how the spread looks when the center zipper is unzipped open to reveal the four-page spread inside:

This photo shows the two loose pages removed and re-attached to each other by zipper:

The loose pages really are interchangeable! Right side, left side, front or back, you decide!